Scientific Director, Marcus Natural Product Program

Lecturer on Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology

Dr. Littlefield joined Harvard Medical School and the Marcus effort on May 1, 2009. Prior to joining HMS, Bruce worked in the pharmaceutical industry for 19 years, leading cancer drug discovery efforts at Eisai Research Institute, the US-based drug discovery laboratories of the global Japanese drug company, Eisai Co., Ltd. At Eisai, Bruce personally initiated, directed, and/or had oversight responsibilities for more than 4 dozen oncology drug discovery programs, most of which were based on pharmaceutical optimization of synthetic analogs of natural products from plant, marine, or microorganism sources. At the time of Bruce's departure, three such programs had advanced to human clinical trials for cancer, including eribulin/E7389, E7974, and E6201. Bruce received his B.S. in Biology, cum laude, from Tufts University, and Ph.D. in Biochemistry from the University of Vermont College of Medicine. After a post-doctoral fellowship in Cell Biology at the Mayo Clinic, Bruce joined the faculty at Yale University School of Medicine as an Assistant Professor, a position he held for 6 years before joining Eisai. Throughout both his training and professional career, Bruce's research has focused on various aspects of cancer cell biology, with his years in industry imparting to him a passion for the discovery and development of novel, high impact, natural product-based cancer therapeutics. Working with the entire Marcus Natural Product Research Program team at HMS, Bruce is responsible for scientific and therapeutic strategies of the Program, establishing suitable internal and external collaborative arrangements, internal leadership on decision-making regarding commercial viability of active lead compounds, and scientific oversight of the screening process and associated data evaluation.